The Enclave Reading series, curating and producing readings on the Lower East Side since 2006 with a focus on authors who “take risks,” now has a new HQ: Club Cumming, the darling of the downtown scene that has been self-described as “a home for everyone.”

The Enclave, founded by authors Jason Napoli Brooks (Cock of the Walk, Shelter) and Jim Freed (The Illiterate), has been wandering the cultural desert of downtown since the Cake Shop, their home for a decade, abruptly closed.

“We had a wonderful rapport with the owners, Andy and Nick, who were truly supportive of our series and our mission to preserve and promote the intellectual culture of the Lower East Side,” Brooks told me via email. “But due to an enormous rent hike, Cake Shop shuttered its doors without much warning to me or other artists who had series there. The new owners of the venue, as far as I could tell, had zero interest in keeping on any of Cake Shop’s music or arts series, or even doing anything remotely similar to what Cake Shop was doing. The place is now some bland wine bar that always looks empty anytime I walk by it on my way to someplace better.”

Beyond the risk-taking writers who have appeared at The Enclave, the regulars attending the series tend toward the downtown legendary, with local luminaries such as Steve Dalachinsky, Ron Kolm, Mike DeCapite, Elinor Nauen, and Liza Béar rubbing shoulders with the “kids” and talking literature. Or just talking smack, like when Dalachinsky noted of the Cake Shop’s basement, “This place smells like cum.” (Circa 2013, per this observer’s memory. Disclaimer: I’ve also read at The Enclave.)

“I’d fold the series before I’d move it to Brooklyn,” Brooks said, clearly serious about preserving this aesthetic and community. “The art, the film, the literature of the LES and the East Village is what attracted me to New York as a young writer in the 1990s. Watching these areas become gentrified and then post-gentrified into a sanitized playground for rich weekenders is an unspeakable tragedy. The mission of Enclave is to preserve whatever we can that remains of the downtown literary world, while promoting the work of young fellow travelers.”

It’s an admirable stance in 2018, and there are few downtown bona fides as legit as getting roughed up by cops on the LES and arrested on trumped-up charges, something Brooks could tell you about.

“One of the best things about Enclave,” Brooks said, “is the atmosphere we’ve cultivated—high intellect meets downtown grit, plus cocktails.” He noted that “Club Cumming is the perfect place for Enclave to continue,” as it “exemplifies the very best of New York nightlife right now.”

Kicking off the new era, this Saturday’s Enclave features Penny Arcade, who echoes Brooks’ stance on gentrification, telling us that the Big Apple is now “the Big Cupcake.”

Also on the bill are “negro-gothic” composer M. Lamar, who crafts “sprawling narratives of radical longing loss and becoming,” and poet and NYU faculty member Jameson Fitzpatrick.

Bradley Spinelli is the author of the novels “The Painted Gun” and “Killing Williamsburg,” and the writer/director of “#AnnieHall.”